Consider how your New Year's Resolutions influence your relationships with other family members. Do you have well established margins to help move forward in the next year? Discover a resource to assist you in setting practical margins.

Have you thought about the ritual of New Year's Resolutions? Many people observe a designated reflection period at the beginning of a new year. People may refuse to make New Year's resolutions and people may embrace this ritual with austere passion. Regardless of the behavior pattern you decide upon, consider this year as one to redefine your margins in life. This time of reflection is also a time to consider how to move forward during the next year.

Here are some questions to answer: How do you want to move forward in this next year? Do you create margins in your life? Where are the margins? How do you communicate your margins with your family members, including young children? Do you set margins in your professional life? What do the margins look like? Will your current margins assist you in reaching your next set of goals?

This is what you know:
Margins are the edges around the text on a page.
Life is the pace you decide.
Your margins in your daily decisions influence others in your life.
A resolution is the process of solving a problem.

Margins and the Children in Your Life:
I am not an expert at setting margins. I have experienced life with very narrow margins and in recent time chose to lean on my peers for assistance. My life coach, Amy Kovarick, assisted me in defining my non-negotiable list when I realized the need to better take care of myself. This strategy of setting a non-negotiable list began to direct me more towards setting necessary boundaries. The change in my behavior greatly impacted the relationship I had with my children and other close friends. Knowing when to say no, however difficult it may have been, increased the quality of my life and drew me to my core values. I entered a life path with more clarity, balance, and peace with my daily decisions. The process of reflecting on the location of the margins in my life is now a frequent behavior as I strive to be my most effective, and authentic self.

Resources to Answer your Questions:
You -- Set the time to consider the questions and journal out your thoughts of where you need to set your margins.
Spiritual Guides -- Identify where you gain your truth. For many, truth is found in spiritual sources such as the Bible.
Life Coach -- Establish a relationship of trust with a life coach, some one who is trained to ask the questions with encouragement and provides accountability.
Experts who know margins -- Read, interview, and learn from the experts.

My expert is Dr. Meggin McIntosh. She is the Productivity Professor (TM). She has guided and encouraged me in many ways how to live with margins. Recently she wrote Creating Margins in Your Personal Life, 52 Tips to Implement Immediately. She compiled practical tips which have helped me and many others redefine the margins. Not only does this mentor speak the words well, she also lives them effectively. This title and others can currently only be obtained on her web site from her company Emphasis on Excellence. All of her resources have been of great value.

Consider this idea of margins. How small or large of margin do you want? Another way to think about margins is this: In the margins is where we really live our life. In the margins is where we experience the authentic self. In the margins is where we truly leave our legacy. Today is a new year of margins.